How to Troll a Troll: Be a Billy Goat Gruff

Here in the productive but not slavish offices of The Curmudgeon, I, the hoary boss, the guy in the large corner office overlooking the peaceful waters of Pelican Bay, sit self-satisfied with a cat-who-just-ate-the-mouse grin on my wizened face. I have a troll and I just began trolling him.

For those who don’t know, a troll is a person who “trolls” the Internet looking for little billy-goats (unsuspecting people) to eat. They will send hateful emails to this person—whom they don’t know—hoping to get a fight out of them, a response, anything to assure them that they have some meaning in their lives. This backwards activity offers them the only reassurance that they matter, that they can affect something, and their incessant bullying of anyone and everyone probably gives them orgasms.

They talk mighty tough with the anonymity of the Internet to hide behind, but you can bet good money that in real life they are sniveling little worms, slight of build and meager-brained. Almost exclusively males (and maybe it is exclusive to men…or boys), you can also bet that they have never had a girlfriend, have never been romantically involved with anyone, and have never had sex (excluding the family dog.) Conventional wisdom says that you should not respond to trolls. “Do not feed the troll,” the saying goes, because once fed, they will come back for more and you never know what lengths they’ll go to to disrupt your life.

moohaha - flickr

Here is how I acquired my troll: I wrote an humorous article about making your own penicillin at home by nurturing mold in your refrigerator. Then I suggested that you could cure illnesses—any illnesses—by consuming it by the spoonful. And it was OK to give it to your kids too. It was totally absurd, but covering my tuchus, I included a funny disclaimer about how it was a joke, that you could actually get sick from doing this, etcetera, etcetera. So this guy leaves a comment that goes like this:
“I Hate Jackasses. This shit did not work”

I did what I was supposed to do. I ignored him. He then sent an email to my personal account through the site, which gives me his email address but does not give him mine. This message read: “dumbasses like you you are a f**king dumbass you shity (sic) redneck” Kind of lame, true, but it still bothered me. You never know about these people, and his elevator obviously doesn’t go all the way to the top floor. Again, I was a good boy and did not reply. At least not right then. But it niggled.

And this is how I have begun to troll the troll. I waited a couple of weeks. I signed up for an anonymous email account that neither reveals who I am or where I live. I should warn you here that you must be careful. Some things are against the law. Never claim to represent an official agency, such as the FBI or the police. Never threaten anyone. Do not cross the line into repeated harassment. Although your target can’t find you by himself, if the police become involved, they very well may be able to. Save any messages—especially the first one—from your troll.

So I sent him my first letter just a couple of hours ago. That’s called “Feeding the troll,” and I shouldn’t have done it. But I did.

How will he react? For starters, he’ll probably have an orgasm. Call it a scientific experiment. If anything fun happens, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’m going to come up with some more tricks which I’ll also keep you apprised of. You know, the Three Billy Goats Gruff was my favorite folk tale as a kid and it was fun to read it again. Google it and read it, if you like. I feel a little like the third goat right now, and it feels good.

Archie: I well understand the psychological makeup of a troll. This troll in particular will not see this (it happened on another site) and hasn’t a clue who the response is from or what he did to elicit said response, surely a frustrating situation for a troll. So, no, it is the troll who has been trolled.

The very first page in the search results is this one. If I received a nasty email from someone the first thing I would do is punch the email address and the body of the email into Google, which in this case would lead me right to you.

Nethermind: Thank you for the comment. However – and perhaps I should have confessed this – this is not the actual letter that was sent, but an approximation of it…the “gist,” if you will. The only reason you’re able to do the Google search is because this us published. The actual letter was not, so a search will turn up nothing. That being said, I haven’t read this post in a very long time, and I don’t think I like it, so I’ll probably delete or change it. So thanks for drawing my attention to it.

NOTE: No one should send a letter like this, and never threaten anybody. That’s against the law and they’re getting stricter about it, so just say no and chalk it up to some sad, mentally unstable kid who – through emotional deformity – is not able to relate to other humans (which is why I will most likely get rid of it.) Thanks.